16th Century Sacrifice of Isaac Drawing Sanguigne on Paper

In Genesis (22: 1-13) it is told how God put Abraham to the test by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The patriarch obeyed and only when he was about to cut the boy’s throat did an angel come down to stop his gesture and communicate God’s satisfaction to him. The scene, not infrequent in Florentine art, symbolized a foreshadowing of God’s disposition to sacrifice his son Christ for the good of humanity. Andrea del Sarto solved the task with monumental figures of the protagonists, elegantly composed to generate a serpentine movement that unfolds along a diagonal.

Isaac is half naked and with one knee and one foot resting on the wooden altar; he has his wrists tied on his back and is bent in fear as he turns his aching face down. Abraham towers titanically behind him, with the dagger steady in his left hand, already stretched out to strike, and his right holding the boy still, while his head turns back to hear the message of the angel just glided from the sky to stop the gesture. The robe of the patriarch, moved by the wind, gives his figure an almost heroic prominence and a strong expressive charge. The background is composed of a rarefied landscape in which a tree can be distinguished, on the left the sheep that Abraham had brought to the sacrifice so as not to arouse suspicion, on the right the servant who waits unaware of what is happening.

Michelangelo’s debts are evident, especially in the figure of Abraham, mindful both of the Prophets of the vault of the Sistine Chapel and of the Tondo Doni; from the latter derives the serpentine rotation and the presence of the naked in the background. But the particular dynamic accent is also reminiscent of the Laocoonte Group, discovered in Rome in 1506 and immediately becoming very popular, all seasoned with the particular “sartesque nuance”, derived from the one by Vinci but brighter in the chromatic range and sandy consistency, and by a well balanced arrangement of the figures, derived from the reflection on the Florentine works of Raphael.

The work is inspired by the canvas depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, painted in oil on wood (213×159 cm) by Andrea del Sarto, datable to about 1527-1529 and kept in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. There is also a less refined version, usually considered as a first draft, at the Cleveland Museum of Art (178×138 cm) and a third version, on a smaller scale, at the Prado Museum (98×69 cm), datable to about 1527-1530. The work was commissioned in 1527 by Giovanni Battista Della Palla as a gift to the French king Francesco I, who about ten years earlier had hosted the artist in Fontainebleau without being able to keep him at his court. In the stormy political events of the time, Della Palla ended up being imprisoned in 1530, before the work was sent and shortly before the artist died, after having made three versions, as Vasari recalls, at different stages of finishing and for different sizes. That of Cleveland was probably an unfinished trial, soon abandoned for a larger work with some variations. The one in Dresden, the largest and best finished, was perhaps the one destined for the French king, but the painting was requisitioned by Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis del Vasto, to whom the monogram on the rock in the foreground refers, added in a second moment. Others, on the other hand, think that the Madrid version is the one owned by the Marquis; the latter is the smallest and is identical to the Dresden version, so it is supposed to be just later. We know of the Madrid version that it was purchased by Charles IV of Spain and is documented for the first time in the Casita del Príncipe in the monastery of the Escorial in 1779, after being transferred to the palace of Aranjuez in 1814, it finally merged with the Prado.